Regional vaccine production features in the draft pandemic accord, but there is still a long road before this becomes a reality Aspen Pharmacare invested millions of dollars in scaling up its South African production plant to make COVID-19 vaccines – yet it never sold a single vial. Meanwhile, in a “demoralising blow”, Bangladesh’s government rejected […] Continue reading ->
HIV activists want the US government to appeal Tuesday’s court ruling that pharmaceutical company Gilead did not infringe on patents held by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) related to two anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs. The US government had claimed $1 billion in patent violations in relation to the use of Gilead’s Truvada and […] Continue reading ->
The global response to COVID-19 failed people in developing countries, women and health workers and must never be repeated, non-state actors told a meeting hosted by the United Nations (UN) in New York on Tuesday. The UN convened the four-hour multi-stakeholder meeting on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (PPPR) in preparation for a High-Level Meeting […] Continue reading ->
The United Nations (UN) is hosting three multi-stakeholder meetings in New York on Monday and Tuesday on tuberculosis, pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (PPPR) and universal health coverage (UHC). They are aimed at getting the views of non-state actors in preparation for UN High-Level meetings in September, starting with pandemic preparedness on 20 September, followed […] Continue reading ->
Equity and intellectual property (IP) rights are – unsurprisingly – the most important and trickiest issues facing countries negotiating the terms on which the next global pandemic will be addressed. This emerged at a World Health Organization (WHO) briefing on Thursday addressed by Precious Matsoso, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) crafting a pandemic […] Continue reading ->
There is widespread speculation that the World Health Organization (WHO) will decide that COVID-19 is no longer a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC)” when its expert group convenes on Thursday. The 15th meeting of the Emergency Committee for COVID-19 has been convened by the WHO Director-General in terms of the International Health Regulations […] Continue reading ->
The conspiracy-based anti-science attacks on scientists and vaccines that proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US are likely to have chilling, long-term effects on biomedicine, according to Professor Peter Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.  The biggest casualty may be childhood vaccinations, leading to […] Continue reading ->
Uganda’s Parliament passed a revised Anti-Homosexuality Bill on Tuesday, retaining executions for certain same-sex activity and introducing harsher penalties for some categories of ‘offences’. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni had declined to sign into law an earlier version of the Bill after the Deputy Attorney General (DAG) had advised him that it would be open to […] Continue reading ->
By the end of 2022, COVID-19 vaccines delivered by the global vaccine access initiative, COVAX,  helped to avert 2.7 million deaths across 92 lower-income countries, according a new report based on modelling by researchers from Imperial College London. COVAX’s biggest success was in low-income countries, where its vaccines were responsible for three-quarters of all deaths […] Continue reading ->